Das russische Testament

Tania grows up in Kolkata during the 1980s. She received her Russian first name from her father, who runs a small bookstore. Unloved by her mother and unprotected by him, she finds refuge in books. In communist West Bengal, Russian culture is everywhere, and so Tania devours Russian children's books at first and later dreams of the worlds of Chekhov and Gorky. It is only as a student that Tania manages to free herself from her family and follow her longing for the foreign culture: Fascinated, she traces the fate of the Jewish journalist and publisher Lev Klyachko, who had to close his publishing house Raduga during the Stalin era and only escaped the death sentence thanks to an intervention by Maxim Gorky. Raduga published surrealistic, non-ideological books for children and adults in the 1920s, translated around the world, including into Bengali. Klyachko died in 1933, but Tania reaches out to his now over eighty-year-old daughter, who lives in a nursing home in St. Petersburg, and the two dissimilar women, who have both endured similar struggles, grow closer. Shumona Sinha powerfully, poetically, and vividly tells the story of three people captivated by literature, which means nothing less than freedom to them.